Saturday, April 2, 2011

Final Day at Guangzhou

Wednesday's final supper

Lilly likes her noodles!

Our final day in GZ had a lazy start. All 3 families packed most of their luggage on Wednesday, so after breakfast and a final packing we traveled by taxi over to Shaiman Island. Mostly we wanted to get out of the hotel room. Hampton and Randy elected to stay behind.

Laughing at her BaBa

Heather wanted to get another pair of shoes for Lilly as they were a lot cheaper than any you can get in the states. Brian, Walker, Lilly and I did not shop much we just walked and looked around. Lilly likes to sit in the stroller, so we think she must had been in one before or sat in some type of chair to play.

We walked over to the park right by Lucy's Restaurant. Lilly did get out of the stroller,but would not really play on any of the equipment. There were lots of children playing and most of them were adopted ones. Some had very obvious medical problems. One cute little boy had a serious split lip problem, but was so happy you quickly saw past the problem. Another little girl had no arms or just very small stubs. Both of these children were on the plane with us from Hong Kong to Detroit. Amazing how all of our stories meshed together in similar fashion. It is also very common for you to meet families on their second or third adoption. We met one family in our hotel with 4 biological children that adopted 2 baby girls, about 12 -14 months old.

The flowers are so beautiful

The park was right on the Pearl River, so we walked over to the walkway. There was a huge tree located right near the wall and under the tree were several couples ballroom dancing. The music was playing and they would dance around the base of the tree. All along the riverwalk people were exercising. There was even a large display board demonstrating moves to do and the area of the body that would benefit by each move. It is obvious they are very serious about exercise.

Dancing under the tree

We ate a late lunch at McDonald's and checked out of the hotel at 1:30. Susan met us in the lobby and we loaded in our two vans to go back to the Consulate office to pick up Lilly's passport and visa. One of our familys, the Turquettes, left that morning by plane to Hong Kong. Randy & I traveled with the Farley family in one van and the Hulings in the other van We left at 2:15 because the consulate is very strict about appointment times and ours was at 3:30. Susan has seen it take an hour to get there, so she always allows plenty of time. Of course it took us 20 minutes. We had to just sit in the van and wait. We finally said our good-byes to Susan around 4 o'clock. With passport and visa in hand we said good-bye to GZ and headed to Hong Kong.

Have you ever been on, "Mr Toad's Wild Ride" in Disney World? Well, if you have you can say you have been in a taxi or van in China. We traveled 3 hours in bumper to bumper traffic. Hey, no problem, you just shift over to the emergency lane until you see police and then you slide back into regular lanes. We have no idea how fast we were going, probably better that we do not know. All 3 hours the countryside almost never changed....high rise apartments and manufacturing. The only open space was on the side of the mountains or river marsh.

As we approached Hong Kong we had to go through customs. By using the 2 small vans we did not have to get out and unload our luggage. We were scanned for temperature elevation. I guess if we had a fever they would not have let us in.

Hong Kong wildfire

We saw a familiar sight on the hillside right as we cleared customs. A wildfire right by the road. It looked like it was threatening several houses. Unfortunately we did not see much of Hong Kong. Our hotel was right at the airport and it is out from the harbor on the other side of the island.

It was an early bedtime as we had a early call to head to the airport at 7 AM.